


GUTS: No Way Of Going Back

by apiphile



Series: thursdayverse [10]
Category: The Used
Genre: Backstory, Epilogue, Gen, Happy Ending, Mob AU, affection through shouting, horrible parents, mental health, pack mentality, scary hospitals, terrible things happen to kids
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-05-11
Updated: 2010-05-11
Packaged: 2017-10-09 09:56:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,207
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/85940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apiphile/pseuds/apiphile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Appendix (Guts!) to Thursdayverse (http://archiveofourown.org/series/3368) so you'll be wanting to read that and Burning Down The House and Digging Upwards first.</p><p>Bert's backstory/epilogue.</p>
            </blockquote>





	GUTS: No Way Of Going Back

Sometimes Bert wonders if the whole world is fucking blind.

Because from where he's standing pretty much everything is obvious now. Where he's _physically_ standing is on the roof of a totally dead Impala eighteen miles away from the Grand Canyon, watching the sun come up while a pile of mixed flesh snores inside the remains of the ancient car.

The clouds are the colour of bloody spittle and there are only two of them cutting like lies across face of the nascent sun. Bert puts his hand in his shorts pockets; it's cold up here. There's something you're meant to do when you're cold but he can't remember what, and he's not sure how you're meant to feel about being cold.

The first time he met Gerard Way (Gerard Way, Gerard fucking fucking Way, Gerard Way, echoes his head) was not the first time he _saw_ him – or at least, not the first time he laid eyes on the guy's face. The first time he got an eyeful of the Way's body was outside some rich kid party on a hill where every single fucking person was wearing sunglasses at night and snickering at someone else.

Bert was alone, pissing in someone's carefully-maintained herbaceous border after a good go at his own herbaceous section; Quinn was on a night monitoring shift at a chemical plant, sucking in poisons through his already-raw throat, getting ready to get fired.

And all he caught was a flash of a moon-faced, smug-looking jerk in too-large sunglasses with stringy black hair falling over his forehead, but there was enough there for it to spark memories when he saw him again.

The first time he actually _met_ Gerard Way (Gerard Way, Gerard fucking Way) instead of just spying on his pale ass at some shitty society shindig from between magnolia blossoms and wondering who the shit felt they needed that much coke; or catching glimpses of him on the benches while he, Bert, pounded someone to mush like a monkey with a nut; when that moment rolled around, Bert had just killed a guy.

Bitten his neck out. _Won_. And winning made him bolder and brighter than anything else, and he just loped and danced his way through to the forbidden place where the Ways congregated (_stumbled_, Quinn has always maintained. _You were stumbling_), not sure what he was doing besides demanding that someone acknowledge his victory properly.

Mikey and Gerard were always coiled together – this memory, their coiling, was later, and Quinn reminds him of that often, but it fits with everything that he believes and hates and loves and knows about that fucking asshole Way, so he keeps it here – black and white, tight. Together.

Bert envied them then. Not just the smooth, unmarked faces of young men who'd no fucking idea what 'starving' meant, what 'agony' meant, who'd no idea what it meant, yet, to be betrayed by the people charged with protecting them. Not just the incalculable wall of privilege they sat atop and didn't even notice.

(_Wearing my best Steerpike_, Bert reflects with grim self-realisation, as he chews down the cold air of a desert night, and _wah wah mommy life isn't faaaaaair. Shut up._)

He envied them most this casual, liquid intimacy, this grace. Their limbs like vines. Their ease, their relaxation.

Every time he smashed and swore and tore in the cages, he aimed it at them. _For your perfect lives and your perfect lies and your hopeless hair and you hopeless pair and your shitty stupid perfect joy_; he couldn't coil like that around Quinn, and for the first time he felt like that was a loss. Something missing.

Quinn was too stiff, too solid for this ropelike embracing. He was an anvil, for breaking things against (mostly faces); even getting kisses out of him was a battle, though a battle that was always worth it. Like little electric pills, each one buoying him up, stealing Quinn's rich red ribald aura; Quinn's anger was a furnace at those fights, radiating over the room from wherever he was shoved.

Bert was already disappointed in Gerard's blindness, then. Surely someone with his eyes should be able to see what sat in his house? If he couldn't see Quinn he didn't see Bert at all, and he might as well have been blindfolded the entire time.

Quinn was too hard for coiling; and Jepha, when he finally came into Bert's circumference, was too soft for it, slipping and slithering to the floor; there was no give in Quinn and nothing but in Jepha.

Bert bounces on his toes as a bird he doesn't know begins to cough the new day in from the branches of a sleeping tree; he's man enough to know he made a mistake, thinking he didn't have what they had, and that it was _his_ failing at all.

Inside the car Jepha will be draped like a used prophylactic over Dan's lap, stinking of sex and cigarettes and peace with his face nuzzled against an armpit and his piercings protruding at wonky angles; Dan will be crushed against the one intact window with his mouth open like a bird bath and his hand over Jepha's back, long thick fingers forming waves around his scapula; and Quinn is probably awake and staring unseeing through the spiderwebbed glass of the windscreen.

Thinking back, the first time he met Gerard Way (Gerard Way, Gerard Way, Gerard fucking Way) he already had the measure of him, really, in his head. Trapped in the stands, Way the Elder. Trapped. Bert might have been the one temporarily in a cage but he was free to walk out of there without a backward glance; not so the heir to the throne. To the empire.

Gerard Way was a fairytale; a lie Bert had told himself.

Bert picks caked-on gummy-worm residue off his molars and flicks them away into the sunrise. The Prince and the Pauper didn't go so well, he guesses. But there are other fairytales: Rapunzel, the pretty princess with pullable hair, anyone's if they can climb up him, and the Frog Prince, his lonely amphibian eyes transformed by a promise and a kiss. And then there's the Big Bad Wolf, awake in the front seat of the old car, his skin stained with blood and smoke and scars, all the anger Bert's been unable to arm himself with washing easily onto Quinn like tide-scurf at the edge of a polluted river. And here on the roof –

Bert raises one foot and pirouettes on his worn sneaker, laughing under his breath to keep time, twirling for an audience of none.

– here on the roof of the car: The Fairy fucking Godmother.

This is all so fucking _dumb_. He'd have happily taught Gerard for the rest of his life, taught him to accept that he was fucking broken, helped him down off his stupid fucking high horse and shown him that roaches throw the best parties and lack of responsibility shapes smiles faster than clinging to the dead. He would have swapped places. The Prince and the fucking Pauper.

Bert could have had security and stability and regular meals and plans that went somewhere, and Gerard could have had company and _peace_ but –

He does a brief tap-dance of cold on the rusting roof as some black blot wings its avian way through the pink-blue towards the half-melon of rising sun.

– _but_ Gerard (Way, Gerard fucking Way) was too blind to see anything beyond his first, hurt little feelings, his tiny stupid grief. Too weak. No starvation, no corruption, no terror, nothing but protection from the start of his precious little life left Gerard goddamn Way a Prince ruled by the wrong part of his heart.

The part that was shootable.

Bert thinks about the shape of them, Bert-and-Gerard, the way he'd groomed himself into a smaller, scruffier, wilder Way; making himself someone else again, losing himself in someone else's mind; he thinks about how, when they found Dan, it was like a pattern emerging from fragments in chaos. Islands of reason became an archipelago. This was who they were, this was who he needed to complete the circuit and make things _right_: Bert-and-Quinn-and-Jepha-and-Dan-and-Bert-and-Quinn…

And Quinn, and Quinn.

Bert squats on the car roof and picks flakes of paint up between his flat-fucked fingertips, turning them over. Quinn was the bookend of a blank spot in his memories: until then it had all been so alphabetically consistent, his life: Mormons, music, molecular chemistry, then meth. Methamphetamine. Morphosis. Madness. Meth.

Then Quinn heaved a brick or something out of a dumpster and raged someone's face off and Bert was hooked in like a fish, back and breathing again, hooked. And _that_ was freedom.

All the ugly broken bitter things Bert has swept up from the gutters and alley floors of the world, crushing them to his skinny fucked-up chest in an effort to turn the world inside-out until there is a place in it for him. To redress the balance by giving shit to the pretty and roses to the vile. All the broken ugly sharp-edged and fucked-rotten things of the world, and Quinn is the most broken, the ugliest, the most toxic of them all. The best, the beast.

Bert hangs onto him every way he can, claws at him and spits on him and eats his snot and owns him; he is thrilled sometimes by the power he has in just saying Quinn's name, the power to stop or start a storm. It takes a tonne of bricks or an army of cops or the thickest of fevers to break Quinn's stride but Bert can do it by whispering one syllable. That, that, this, Quinn is _his_.

Once, Bert won sixty-five dollars and an apology because some jerk in Gainsville didn't think the 'dead-eyed psycho' (dead, Bert's ass. The things that live in Quinn's eyes don't have names or boundaries, that's all. They scare people to mention, but they're very much alive) could hold out against his painted tigerish pit bulls. And he was proven quite, quite wrong.

Dogs stop. Storms stop. Quinn is PCP, perpetual hatred, the heat death of the universe, a Moebius of rage, and _Bert's_. He doesn't stop 'til Bert says stop.

By the time the brick came out of a rainy dumpster Bert was tired of pain already. He'd made up his mind there wasn't going to be any more, like he'd burnt grief and remorse and anger and fear off his head with electroshocks and screams, his singed hair and his vomit-fronted hospital greens bearing witness to all those little deaths, all the synapses fusing together. But it was a hard resolution to keep at all of sixty-four inches high and weighing less than his own farts.

It got easier with someone to guard him.

He was wrong about Gerard, he was right about Quinn, he was right to think ugliness meant worthiness, and the sun rises like a bad meal from a drunk throat.

Bert flicks paint down onto the desert floor and scratches his nose. He's tiniest like this, balled up on the roof with his hands over his head, small enough to see every atom. Everyone else really must be fucking blind; can't they see the levers, the lines, the _buttons_ to push? It's so easy.

His piano teacher called him "preternaturally gifted" when he was seven. Bert considers this laziness and blindness and deafness all rolled into one. Anyone with their eyes open and functioning ears can see and hear where their fingers need to be to make the sounds come out right. It's there in the chest and the bones. People are dumb.

The shapes of the world are simple and people are dumb and predictable and dumb and stupid and dumb and they drag wet sharp nails over Bert's nerve endings when he's least expecting it, like fucking fucking Gerard fucking Way.

Rachmaninoff, gummy worms, Quinn, caffeine, plastic tiaras, the smell of burning tires. Even the cold and the aching joints in the sunrise, counterbalanced against the fucking fattie he's going to smoke when the others wake up; everything imperfect and crooked and worthwhile.

(echoing halls. Nurses. Lies and lights and so much fucking pain; the absence of a loving God, an eternity of fuck you right in his juvenile eye sockets)

Quinn's head appears over the top of the car, a clank and a bang of a door rattling on its ruined hinges. He breaks everything, Bert thinks, but there's no sullenness in the thought any more. Quinn's meant to break everything; things are meant to be broken. The world's a rattled fucked mirror that needs shattering and it's _right_ that Quinn keeps colliding with it and smashing the edges.

"It's _cold_," he snaps, and he doesn't say a thousand other things. He doesn't even put his hands in his armpits to keep them warm, just stands an awkward-shouldered _Quinn_ by the car, angry with thermodynamics for his discomfort.

Bert flops on his back and shoves his face upside-down into Quinn's armpit, his rancid t-shirt. He inhales; Quinn stinks. He smells of sweat and burning, sulphur traces and weed, and the sick, meaty scent of rotted-on and rotted-in blood. Under his hair follicles, under his fingernails. Decay and death and violence and smoke.

Bert inhales again, the loose sleeve of Quinn's Queen t-shirt hanging over his face and sticking in his nostrils.

"Sun comes up and the world says hello all over again," Bert mumbles, twisting his fingers into the hem of gray cotton that's so worn it's almost see-through.

"Tell it to come up faster, I'm fucking dickless with cold here." Quinn pauses. "And your mom's going to be heartbroken."

"Good thing _your_ mom's such a hippo the cold doesn't bother her," Bert yawns, chewing a mouthful of the nastiest-ass fabric in the world. "You smell like a hobo, Quinnery-Quinn-fuckface-slimebucket."

"I smell like your mom's pussy," Quinn corrects, distant with recent sleep (Bert'd bet, if he still bet, that Quinn's been awake ever since he crawled out onto the roof; his ears attuned to Bert-movement like a bat's to moths), "it's not my fault the whore's cunt's so vast there are hobos having cookouts in there."

Bert warms from the inside out at this, and rewards Quinn for this poetic turn by biting the tender flesh of his underarm; Quinn flinches and swears quietly. It's not like getting Jepha off, Quinn doesn't _enjoy_ pain like that (no writhing, no moaning), but he … he speaks Bert's language.

And realisation dawns with the shuddering streaks of sun that he's spent the better part of a fucking month trying to translate himself to someone who wasn't listening and would never even realise he was being spoken to at all. And here he is, _fuckassing_ into the armpit of someone whose … whose … whose _mom is always a ripe and open target_. Who speaks Bertese like a native.

"Shit," Bet says, and cackles a despairing laugh that sounds so much like the crackle of electricity that he's almost sterile-fucked all over again.

"Pussyjuice," Quinn retorts, and a minute later there's a slimy trail of snot on Bert's throat, dribbled off the edge of Quinn's bumpy, scabby forefinger.

"**SHIT!**" Bert shrieks, the sound only partially muffled by Quinn's foul-smelling underarm. He inhales hard as the world shakes and shimmies around his head; Jepha and Dan can only pretend to be asleep now. "_SHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIT._"

"Fuck you," Quinn adds, dead-voiced. It's sick-ugly and imperfect and everything right-wrong. Bert clutches at the handful of fabric amongst his fingers. If Jepha said that, he'd say, 'later', and maybe he would, would fuck him. Or not.

He isn't really sure what, exactly, people _get_ from fucking. In his experience what he gets is tired, and some white shit, cocksnot, dribbling out of his dick. Not the earth-shattering, mind-blowing deal it seems to be for everyone else. He just likes seeing Jepha happy.

(And Quinn, Quinn's a complex knot of want/don't want/want/don't want, his own little chemical structure of impossible touch)

But this, this is Quinn here. Quinn's a no-fuck zone, a no-dick-handling zone; even when some fuckhole doubled back from an unexpected quarter on Bert's mongoose, his Quinn, and broke his fucking elbow (the unexpected howl of pain still reverberates in Bert's skill like it's his own shriek; considerate fuckass Quinn went to ER alone, no dragging Bert into the wipe-clean hell of a waiting room), he wouldn't let anyone hold his dick to piss. Not so much as piss.

Fumbled and fucked his shorts open and stood there swearing and sweating in a cast and a sling and a lot of pain ("He's lucky he doesn't need a pin in it," Jepha relayed, returning from the fucking fucking hospital with a report and a kiss and a stolen rose), trying to piss in the verge. Jepha offered, Bert offered, but Quinn just snapped and ended up pissing down his own leg.

Bert hung off his neck like a second sling, getting in the stream, biting at his chin. They both stank of Quinn's piss 'til he could move his arm again. Stupid asshole.

Quinn says, "It's still cold."

Bert grunts, "Go fuck a polar bear."

"Your mom's a polar bear," Quinn sighs.

(Time stands still when the first electric current passes through his head. Bert stops all the clocks. Before that, before the metal plate on his tongue and the straps on his arms, Bert could see only music and the spidery shapes of chemical structure in the surface of everything; pre-sound and molecules. Afterward, Bert can see _everything_.

His parents were afraid of what people would say. They got a man with smiles and suits to drive the demons out and out and out and out and out and out, and somewhere between self-induced faux-seizures and screaming he looked down into the abyss and saw they'd been lying all along; _God never gave a shit_, if he was there at all he was in the oil slick under his parents' car or the roadkill crow on the way to school, between the sharps, flats, and whole notes. Small as a virus, a thought, an electron).

Bert lifts Quinn's t-shirt and jabs him in the navel. It's dried-on sweat-smeared, and even under the grime of Bert's fingers he can feel the smooth, scaly texture of scars. Their shapes, their patterns.

"We have a _mission_," Bert says decisively. "I have to piss in the Grand Canyon. It's the American Dream."

"Uh-huh," Quinn pulls his t-shirt down. "How are we getting to the Grand Canyon, Horatio fucking Alger? There is no car."

Bert sits up and shrugs, one movement. Quinn has circles around his eyes like someone filled his old goggles up with soot. Bert doesn't know where the goggles went, but he guesses they'll find some more if they need them. "I don't know, fuckhead. Something'll happen."

* * *

"He plays very well," Mrs Pickering had noted when she visited. She said it every time and Bert's parents glowed with a smug pride on each occasion. This time she held her coat closed as if the winter had followed her inside, and there were the grim harmonics of suspicion in her creaking voice, like Bert might just be thumping aimlessly at the ivories, while some tape deck played out the deception. At least, that's what Bert thought it meant at the time. "Really, almost unnaturally well. It's not normal."

Bert listened with his hands over the keys, listened to the minute pause in which his parents decided if they were going to mention the two hours or more of daily, concerted practice, or if they were going to mention God's blessing bestowed on them in the guise of a tiny prodigy.

"He's very focussed."

Well, it wasn't like there was very much else he could stand to do. He was too small for even soccer and too ill-coordinated for softball and they'd never let him even _touch_ paint in case he got _dirty_, the walls of the house so white and unscuffed.

"Mmm," Mrs Pickering said in a voice that meant she, personally, didn't approve. Bert was very familiar with it. "Unusual for such a young boy."

Bert's parents did not mention anything about pushing him or discipline or the fact that young boys were not all alike, because Mrs. Pickering had three sons of her own and all of them were to music what Bert was to softball. He grinned to himself, and began to pick out the opening to Für Elise, a simple bagatelle in rondo form, in A minor, that no one could possibly object to as unnaturally talented.

A week later they were spitting on him in the halls. It was nothing new, but normally he could rely on one of the omnipresent teachers to intervene. This time: nothing. Children from good homes were always the worst.

Another week passed and he was called down from his room to meet a man with a short-shaven face and grey eyes who identified Bert almost immediately as being inhabited by all kinds of evil spirits.

Bert had a rye cracker in his mouth (no cookies before 4pm, house rule) and a pencil behind his ear and didn't feel especially inhabited by much beyond the gurgling rumble of someone who has not yet had lunch but who is far enough away from breakfast to be feeling a little uncomfortable. He had not hitherto been aware that dire evil and mild hunger were so similar.

It was there in his eyes, said the Good Reverend (Bert never did remember his name). Untainted children did not stare like that.

Bert stared at the floor instead, and went to sit at the piano. It was eleven. It was time for weekend practice, AM. The Good Reverend was merely an obstacle.

The devil sends disobedience into the minds of the innocent, the Good Reverend said.

Bert stared up at him from the piano stool with unblinking baby blues like a china doll and waited for his parents to say: he's very focussed. Or, God has blessed us with this heavenly music. You don't understand. He's very focussed.

But what they said was: "We are forever indebted to you for your kindness and your time, Reverend."

The Good Reverend had a voice with guitar strings in it and he came from somewhere further south, and he has skin like pitted earthenware pot. He smelled of moisturiser and hand cream and lies. He said, "This might take a while. The agents of the wicked one do not yield easy even to God's anointed servants."

Bert's parents nodded in pale unison and Bert fingered the keys impatiently, not depressing them, just touching the worn ivory. Two hours, and then back to his room to watch the sun crawl from window to window.

Deliverance cost a lot of money, in the end, and it didn't deliver them the way they wanted.

Whatever evil had supposedly taken root in Bert's previously "angelic-looking" body, it wasn't coming out easy at all. Time after time, hand after hand, prayer after prayer, blank stare after shouted exorcism, and still Bert could feel and taste and smell the notes of a concerto bubbling in the air molecules around the piano. Pre-sound in the ivory.

He learnt eventually, eventually. If he wanted to get back to the damn piano, if he wanted to get back to the damn room, if he wanted the Good Reverend to go the hell (a word he'd only just begun to use) away, he collapsed and shook. There was a specific window of time; forty-five minutes was the soonest it would work. Forty-five minutes of pushing on his head and babbling and his hands pressed to the slippery-rough leather of a book, and then the vibrations started.

Shake, shake, shake, fall, thrash, kick, babble. Occasionally he threw in some screams. Then less occasionally, because it felt better, after forty-five minutes, an hour, of sitting still with the Good Reverend pushing his face back, to let some of his irritation out. Sometimes a growl and a scream. Sometimes it sounded unearthly even to him.

His parents changed slowly, but they changed.

Like pupating moths wiggling in the soup of their own bodies, under pale, elastic skins; their faces in the background like ghosts each time he fell from the kitchen chair and bucked to the bones.

Their glances over the breakfast table grew suspect, and colder. Distance doubled through the milk jug. Their words got shorter and colder. Their reaction to the bruises and spit-damp clothing as he returned from first elementary and then junior high grew less and less sympathetic, and Bert took to hiding in bushes and sneaking round culverts to get back to his house.

And who knew; if he collapsed and screamed and twisted like there was something trying to get out, people didn't hit him so often, either.

"Deceitful, wicked creature," Mrs. Pickering said, watching Bert watch her from the stairs. She had a plate with a slice of cake on it and her Sunday pearls on; Bert had his face pushed into the gap between two banisters, his knees touching each other, his arms wrapped around his thighs. The cracks in the wood made one side of salt water solution (sodium and oxygen here, hydrogen hidden under his bare big toe) and she stared at him like he'd covered himself in dogshit and started barking. "I don't know how you can stand to keep him in the house."

They took him to see the doctor.

Eleven: Bert's eyelashes were long and thick and his bones were thin as grass stalks. He could walk on his hands, recite the periodic table backwards, and set the whole damn thing to music.

"He has fits," Bert's mom said.

"He's not epileptic," the Good Doctor said. The results were right there. Bert knew damn (he was coming to love that word) well that he wasn't epileptic.

 

"Nothing helps," Bert's mom said. Bert looked at her mouth, pursed up like a cat's anus, and saw that she meant, _we're tired of him now. Make him go away._

"Have you tried—"

He did not like the pills. They worked, if "work" was what they did, by depriving him of all movement, care, interest, and energy. He stopped lifting his feet, his fingers, his eyelids, and slept. And slept. And slept.

Every minute was an hour but when it passed he couldn't remember having experienced anything at all. Whenever he was required to leave his bed he had to hurl himself at the floor and screech to get momentum enough to crawl to the bathroom. Food sickened him. Bert rolled over and over in his bed, trying to find a spot where he could slip between the atoms of his mattress and disappear.

"They don't … produce satisfactory results," Bert's mom said. He wanted to cling to her, to her dress, and shout that everything would be fine if they just _let him get on with it_.

"There are other ways," the Good Doctor acknowledged.

_Ways where the doors were locked at night, and the walls shook with howling voices, and hollow-eyed kids stared through each other like ghosts._

"How much will it cost?" Bert's mom asked. Her dress was printed with flowers, flowers that didn't really exist in real life, somewhere between magnolias and roses and generous blots of pale colour.

_Ways where nurses with hands like hams and hair like fire frisked him daily in case he was hiding the means of escape, fiddling his drugs, sliding slicing toys between his toes, lying._

"It won't be cheap," the Good Doctor acknowledged, "but I'm sure you want the best level of care for your son."

_Ways that led to Bert knowing more about his fucking medication than the people prescribing it to him; ways between corridors, ways that led to rooms with tiled walls and empty spaces. Ways where the air was too clean to breathe._

Bert looked sideways at his mom. The sun from the venetian blinds over the Good Doctor's windows shone through the topmost layers of her hair, and traced the paths of every dust mote dancing in between the light source and his eyes. She didn't look, any more, like she wanted the best level of care for her son. She looked like an angry grub, a scowling pupa; she wanted him gone.

_Ways that involve wires and plates and straps and the smell of singing. His head shaved. Blood in his ears. Kind words and long words, the smell of disinfectant and the smell of terror-piss. Ways that sear holes in his understanding and tear God right out of heaven and pin it to a table._

"What's the place called?"

* * *

Because of Branden (who is because of Bert, a fact Bert is all too aware of) Quinn vanishes into the bowels of a prison for two fucking years. It's a two-year-long kick in the stomach. Two very very _long_ years: in hospital time has no meaning between "in" and "out", and in meth time has no memories or measure beyond "on" and "off", and Quinn's vanished years are the longest _real_ years of Bert's life.

Bert gnaws his knuckles in a cheap motel room he has no way of paying for while Jepha stares at him waiting for a plan. The walls are high and off-white, the colour of mushrooms, and Bert's not felt so small in a long time.

He doesn't have a fucking plan.

His plan is _don't die_ and his plan is _how_. That's it.

When they're kicked out, Bert breaks them into a black cab parked behind a club with broken windows, and Jepha snoozes with his face in Bert's lap, gumming drowsily on his own bare and inky forearm with his lank, unwashed hair spilling out from under a crooked trucker hat. Bert goes right on chewing his knuckles, staring into the orange-washed night, his other hand looping a pinky through Jepha's flesh tunnel to anchor him tight. They can't do this, not on their own. Shit will _happen_.

Bert can fight one guy okay. Jepha can fight one guy okay (as long as he remembers he's not fucking that guy), but they can't keep their own against five. Or twelve. Or however many come sniffing around, drawn by the smell of two faggy-looking fuckers, Jepha's Zen-face, Bert's untameable snicker. They are wounded gazelles right now. Fucked.

There are ways around it, but Bert's tired of sucking dick, too. That went with meth. He isn't that guy any more and he's not going to fucking let Jepha be that guy any more either. There are other ways

Other ways.

Ways.

So Bert drags them back to a fight-filled basement in a city far from where Quinn's locked up (looking over his shoulder every step of the way, sure someone can see the blood trail from where he's wounded, sure someone can see they're fucked), and he says, we're both here to show you what we can do. We're both here to fight for you. But not with each other.

(Later, Quinn doesn't ask why he was never in the cages himself, and Bert doesn't say, "you're my _secret_ weapon, Quinnface," and he doesn't add, "you wouldn't stop when they tapped out. You wouldn't stop till they put you down.")

Bert counts off two years by tearing at men twice his size and watching Jepha writhe and burn and twist and forget to tap out. He counts off two years biting and pinching Jepha, but it's not the same. He doesn't have to grapple for kisses; Jepha's ass gets fucked, but he's no fuckass. He's no mongoose.

In spring Quinn comes out pale and fucked, reborn into the world, trailing angry grudges like afterbirth. They've prettied him up in there, his Quinn, given him new scars and broken something else inside him: Bert wonders what they used and is surprised to learn (eventually) that it was _words_.

Quinn comes out more fucked-up and ugly-blurry than he went in, part-digested, and Bert can't keep his hands in his pockets at all.

He stole the house especially. Bert doesn't tell Quinn though, or that they kept watch and mailed lying letters to the owners or drugged guard dogs or twisted through skin-ripping fences to get it; he just lets Jepha ta-daaaa their gift with his hands and his grille (it's tacky and cheap and trashy; Bert approves). And he pokes and prods Quinn all over the horrid clean bed-sheets until Quinn yells at him to let him fucking sleep and that he hopes Bert fucking dies and he wishes he was still in prison and furthermore that Bert smells of poo.

Right there in the middle of his ugly angry prison words is Bert's childish curse, like a tattoo on his vocabulary, like a stain on his DNA.

And Bert's, right there, he's, he's never in his life felt … so sure … of … just what a massive skank ho Quinn's mom is. No one's mom could ever be such a huge disgusting whore, ever. There is no fatter, ranker, bigger-cunted mom on the planet.

(He never says, for two years I've been wearing you in public. I walked your walk and I fought your fights and I tried to look like you and smell like you and think like you. He gives Quinn back himself and doesn't mention it)

When Quinn wakes up again Bert gives him a screamed list of all the ways he sucks and just what Bert has been doing to his mom for the last two years; Jepha makes this gross-tasting concoction and swishes about the huge-ass kitchen in a robe pretending to be some antebellum fucking whore via a ghetto, satin and sucking teeth, tea and tattoos.

Bert reads Quinn's eyes after the piss-hurling incident (that's pretty fucking funny) and gives him wine bottles and matches and every dirty word he knows except the dirtiest, the one all the others mean.

There are explosions and eating sugar cubes and four thousand dollar champagne and chaos and a grand piano. For a week there is nothing but noise and movement and the sharp, rancid smell of Quinn sweeping back under the doors like the aftermath of a fire; Bert digs in his fingers and whoops and staggers. There will be no more waiting.

* * *

He read Quinn's eyes when Branden crawled bloody-legged into the hotel, and shouted _no_ through his own pupils. _No. I know and I know but no, not now. Not now._ But there was no way he could put himself behind that _no_ like he meant it, not there; in the middle of trying to slip into Gerard fucking Way's fingers he's confronted with the proof that it'll never fucking work and his hands twisted themselves into knots and out again, mirroring his brain. _Shut up shut up shut up shut up_.

He watched Quinn break Branden to bits.

And he had to admit everything looked better that way; up on the railings, looking down into a gorge that's older than words and still full of heavy tar-black shadows as the morning creeps up on the world, Bert throws his arms up at the sun, forcing Jepha to brace his legs before he can drop back onto his ass.

The world's a shattered mirror and finding fragments that fit together is extraordinary and crazy; false reflections of crooked edges crop up now and then, and one day he's going to learn to see them for what they are before he cuts his fucking hand on them, or his heart, or his – Bert unzips his fly. "MOTHERFUCKER!" – or _his Quinn. _

Bert takes a minute to coax his bladder into life; it is full of the needling feeling that suggests either cystitis or a bruised urethra, and pissing stings dark orange instead of the shower of triumphant gold he's been hoping for. This is not fun, but Bert's going to fucking pee this gulch a new river if it's the last thing he does.

Jepha's hands are tense around the backs of his thighs. Quinn is smoking an ordinary, unweeded cigarette. Bert whoops and winces.

Mostly it's easy to see where things go and how they fit and what to do and how to say things; or to feel the places where the edges will merge. Like Dan – all the lines of the world converged around Dan like he was a fucking magnet, and not just because Jepha was looking at those strangler's hands like he could will them around his scrawny throat by staring, get himself wedged between them by smiling.

Because they were hanging out by the Co-op bins, watching buses roll towards the depot in empty pretence that they had somewhere to be, waiting for the security staff to fuck off away so Bert could _freecycle_, dredge up the end-of-day remains of untainted food that the fuckers loved to toss bleach and broken glass over (fucking awful it would be if someone hungry got food no one else wanted) and Dan just came out of the fog like a ghost; Quinn insists it was sunny, but Bert likes mist better. More dramatic. Anyhow, Dan comes to them, sloughing off an old skin.

He shambled. He was broken and ugly and untidy and lost and Bert's chest swelled like a party balloon at the lips of an enthusiastic cheerleader. _Mine_. Because he knew his own when he saw it.

Bert wasn't exactly surprised that Jepha more or less hurled himself at Dan the minute the guy was sitting down. It was right there in his smile. Or that Quinn stayed silent and bogarted an entire fucking fattie until he was stoned enough and smooth enough to limit himself to "hi", and _giggling_. Oh yes. Dan made Quinnery-Quinn-Quinnface fucking _laugh_ and for that alone he was, Bert knew, a keeper.

When Quinn passed out (his toast-rack, rail-track ribs heaving with struggled breaths, like a car-crash victim, on his back) and Jepha slid into post-coital coma with Dan's hand on his thigh still (cupping it, holding it in place), Bert bored his blue gimlet eyes down into Dan's popping frog eyes and said, "No secrets."

And Dan opened his mouth and told him _everything_.

Quinn has a fire, and Bert has a fracture, and Jepha has a hole, and Dan has a cloud. A shadow. When Bert first saw it for himself he thought he saw Dan was a broken-backed kitten or a roadkill dog, struggling out from under an impossible weight with his back legs flopping and scrabbling (he thought of the man in Jersey, then, and the way Quinn leaves a slug-trail of blood wherever he walks, if you have the eyes to see it).

The shadow of Dan fell across Dan and Bert could see the desperate smile vanish out before it came every time; the first time, he dissolved into hysterical laughter. Whooped until his tear-ducts burst their banks and his face itched and swelled and he was reduced to wiping his nose over the nearest person for a few minutes while grinning inanely and barking.

It was so fucking hollow and horrid in there, under that shadow. He could see that, but he could also see that there were ways of keeping that shadow off him, and how had no one else seen and how had no one else done it? Just like no one else thought to turn Quinn's fires into a source of heat or plug the hole in Jepha with something he could _feel_; everyone in the world was fucking stupid and no one's eyes _worked_.

"Poor Dan," Jepha muttered, not quite asleep, his mouth slack and salivating over Dan's bicep. His hair greasy and grabbable, his eyes closed.

Dan flicked him in the ear and Jepha's face creased into a drowsy smile. "If you pity me again," Dan said seriously, "I will turn you inside out and use you to plant geraniums in. And then no one will ever love you again. You'll be geraniumumblefucked."

* * *

Fighting for the Ways – for their guests – was not intentional. In Gainesville Quinn fought three pitbulls and their owner gave Bert sixty-five dollars and some advice: don't let this fucker fight anyone, ever.

(_this fucker_ was well within earshot, wiping dog guts from his eyes in slow, uninterested swipes, picking fur from between his teeth. He looked like he'd been swan-diving in offal, an abattoir thrill-seeker who'd graduated on to rolling in furs)

Six weeks of no pursuit away from a nameless fart-scented Jersey town where Bert watched his mongoose wipe the bloody smear of a human life into the street and felt nothing but gut-prickling relief to have _found_ this fuck-up before someone else did (Quinn found him, they found each other, they drained together like turds in a public restroom; God or fate or gravity sucked them toward each other); Bert just smirked at the guy and said, "Maybe you should get alligators."

Because right then he was fucking invincible. No one was after them. Everything was amazing.

"Your man fight alligators?" It might have been an insane question under usual circumstances but Gainesville was an insane place and Quinn had just proven for the horrified amusement of four men in trucker caps that it wasn't a good idea to underestimate what an angry freak with blurred tattoos and an awkward-shouldered walk can do.

"Only if you need handbags." Bert grinned. He was more showing his teeth than his willing. Quinn had a spiked collar in his hands and dog fur on his cheek and looked like he was about to carry on with whomever got closest next; Bert was kinda eager to get away, but money was money and they'd been too fucking hungry.

"Uh-huh. _You_ fight alligators?" the guy was over his doggy heart-break pretty fucking fast, and his money. Bert guessed he was thinking ahead to what would happen if he got himself a boy who'd fight alligators.

And so Bert gave him the most crazy-eyed smile he had, the light of a beer sign in the barroom basement dancing over his chipped teeth, and said in a breathy whisper, "I fuck alligators."

There was money in bloodshed, that much was clear as the stolen bottle of fucking Evian Bert gave Quinn to wash in, but it wouldn't be Quinn's doing if they wanted to get the fuck out again alive; too many murders too soon couldn't go unnoticed forever.

And so when Bert lay down at a crossroads to hear the lie of the land and heard the name "Toro", he decided to follow it to source, like a barbed fish up a stream of piss.

"FAGGOT."

Some jerk, some suicidal jerk threw a beer bottle from a passing car at where Quinn was sitting, shaking pebbles from his shoes. The bottle smashed beside him and Quinn didn't look up; he'd walked two miles on grit and shards in sneakers that were more hole than rubber.

Bert pried himself up from under the chassis of a parked silver BMW and scampered through the dawn gloom (slate-grey/blue and really, genuinely, honestly misty this time, filled with the feather rufflings of sleepy winter migrants in black ink, bone bundles like him who thrived only in the warmth) to crunch the glass shards underfoot.

"I could fight bulls. Ride bulls," he announced, shuffling his hair behind his ears. It seemed to stop growing half-way down his neck every time, wrapped around itself in self-coitus.

Quinn shook a blood-stained pebble out of his sneaker and stared, sleepless in a three-day flush. His hair was blonde to the scalp – Bert bleached it in a public restroom. To be safe, to smother the association in the minds of any possible witness's mind with that bloody boy who dragged his borrowed hammer behind him like an epilogue. A snail-trail of viscera, Quinn's legacy splattered up his legs. "Bulls." His incredulity was swallowed by the insanity of sleep-deprivation: Quinn looked like he was looking into the universe next door.

"How hard can it be?" Bert asked, picking dead skin from his lip, pulling it out of shape. _ow arg am igg ee?_

"You mean," Quinn said, shoving his sneaker back on over bare foot, "bulls. Pre-beef. Cowboy shit." He put his hands in his armpits (Bert was always surprised this never melted off his finger tips; he spent enough time sleeping up close to those pits to know their chemistry) and hunched his shoulders against the damp air. He knew well enough what Bert meant.

"I _mean_," Bert said, digging orange wax out of his ear, "I have to see a man about a burger. A burger burglar. A Burgher." He kicked Quinn in the bare and yellowing toenail of his other foot. "Fuckass."

_Toro_ was a man it was impossible to meet, but the men who arranged for the men who arranged for the men who talked to the man who ran the _bulls_ said they'd put him in a cage with a fighter and if Bert lived they'd give him a hundred dollars. The cynicism was at least predictable and understandable; Bert looked like a scalded cat stuffed into the body of a child and he had less muscle mass than a newspaper. So the cynicism was expected; the way they'd obviously tried to make that hundred dollars a non-payment was not.

He should have guessed they were going to try and wipe the floor with him. Everyone tried that shit.

"You're going to die," Quinn said baldly, looking everywhere but at Bert's face. The room was full of sounds and smells and shit and dicks in suits with shining faces. Drunk and excited. Waiting for someone to fuck up and tap out. The last fight was electric; some punk dick called Wentz or something with no regard for his own life. Quinn was so fucking tense he was apparently hardly breathing, his chest and shoulders straight, angry lines. "Eyes and throat."

"And balls." Bert tied off the grubby bandage with his teeth. His heart was playing some fucked up disco beat he'd never heard from it.

"You're going to die, asshole," Quinn snarled. His thigh was twitching.

"No flowers. The family appreciates donations to the buttmonkey foundation for homofags and fuckasses," Bert began wrapping his other hand. He wasn't entirely sure what good that was meant to do, but everyone else seemed to have done it and Quinn hadn't said anything about not doing it. His legs were shaking like tards on a rollercoaster.

"Asshole."

"Check me out," Bert held up his bandaged hand. "I'm a mummy. I'm going to Tutenkamoofuckyourshitup."

"It's called _dying_."

"It's called suck my dick, Quinn." Bert rubbed his mouth on Quinn's bicep, and Quinn pulled away, jerking his head to one side. There were men in the cage sluicing the floor, buckets and mops. These fights were messy, brutal, fucked up - the kind, Bert thought, that Quinn would be perfect for.

Y'know. Right up until they wanted the fight to actually _end_.

"Fuck you. You fucking, fucking asshole. You're going to die." Quinn was beginning to sound agitated, the kind of agitated Bert only really recognised from his angry demands that no one was to touch his fucking dick. It didn't help; Bert was practically jumping from foot to foot and the world was beginning to go shivery at the edges. Everything felt too light and kind of greasy, the air and the blood in his veins. His teeth were chattering. His clothes felt too tight and he kinda wanted to tear them off.

He started to laugh; high-pitched and cascading, with no end in sight.

"Gimme your hand," Bert instructed, still giggling. Down the scale, over and over. His head was starting to ache and no one had even punched it yet.

"Fuck you."

"GIVE ME YOUR FUCKING HAND QUINN," Bert shouted. "I need you to hold something for me."

Quinn extended his hand palm-up. Bert pretended not to notice the tremor in his ragged fingertips; just seized his wrist at the discolouration line and pulled his cupped hand level with his face.

"Look after this for me." Bert spat the biggest, greenest lump he could into the gaps between Quinn's fingers, and caught his eye. Held his eye, firm and blue-to-muddy-brown, trying to still the breath in his chest until he was as rigid and rock-solid as Quinn. "I'm fucking coming back for that, Quinnface, so don't you go _eating_ it or sticking it up your ass or selling it to anyone."

"You fucking asshole," Quinn said very quietly.

"I'm going to win this fight and then I'm going to ride your whore mom like a space hopper," Bert said, grabbing his own crotch by way of a farewell. "And then you're going to fucking kiss me on the fucking mouth. You'll see."

And Bert went out into the cage and Bert won.

Against this man-mountain with his tear-drop tattoo that he was pitted against in some sort of externally-induced suicide bid, Bert fucking _won_. More by fluke than by design, perhaps; he'd dived between the dude's legs because he saw it in a film once and smacked his forehead square into sweaty balls hard enough to dislodge the jockstrap. The crowd roared like a tidal wave, as loud as the guy he'd nut-butted, so Bert did it again.

The crowd roared like the sea reflected in a shell. Like his blood, they roared.

Bert scaled the huge fucknut like a kid's jungle gym, his knees and elbows as much a part of the process as his feet and hands, and stuck his thumbs in the guy's eyes.

The crowd roared.

_They cheering for me_, Bert whispered inside, and he roared back as the huge dude screamed and hit the deck; rode him down like he was riding a bull, and the huge dude tapped out with some urgency and Bert ground his fingers into the guy's face.

He didn't get his kiss or his hundred dollars; life was rarely fucking fair. He got fifty bucks and the promise of another match, and a guy in a grey suit with grey curls and a greyish face ignored him pointedly as he stamped past, sweaty and blood-smeared and panting. Someone who was dick enough to wear aviator shades in a darkened room showed Bert the door.

Like he couldn't find it on his own.

Quinn was already out there, pissing on the Fire Exit sign as it lay on the ground. No need to ask how it got down there.

"Invest wisely in your children's futures," Bert announced, waving the fifty at him like Quinn was a whore in a strip club, "and this nation will go far. Did you see me?"

"They threw me out," Quinn said, his nail-studded monotone doubtless covering a multitude of now-bandaged bodyguards and threats against Bert's safety that it must have taken to get him on the other side of this door.

"You didn't see me?" Bert tried to sound crestfallen but he was still so high his feet couldn't feel the asphalt as they walked away from the non-descript low-roofed building. He stuffed the fifty in the waistband of Quinn's frayed and worn pants and Quinn swore at him and hit him in the arm hard enough to deaden it from the elbow down. "You saw me?" Bert made glasses with his fingers and squinted through them at Quinn. Somewhere across the parking lot, between them and the road, guys in hoodies were watching like a small circle of jackals. Bert didn't care. He was fucking invincible. "X-Ray vision."

Quinn eyed the dark shapes under the street light and said, "Right. I saw you."

Because Quinn'd always been able to see him.

* * *

"Now what?" Quinnn complains, tossing chunks of stone down into a national monument to the forces of nature from his perch: slumped next to red swivel-mounted viewing binoculars. It is midday and Bert is thinking; he is also thirsty and hot and giggling to himself at the way parties of school kids and parents with their families keep rushing up to the binoculars excitedly, stopping short when they see Quinn (half-bald, blood under his fingernails, rancid as a road-killed fox, and dressed like a dumpster-diving bum, with several shiny-purple brand-new scars laid bare for all to bear witness to), and trying to back up and away without looking like they are doing it. They smell nervous.

Bert's thinking. Quinn's killing time and sand-flies, scrubbing sweat out of his eyes and scratching his balls, and Bert unexpectedly _WANTS_.

He's thinking, and he's not sure what, tapping fingers on his chin and on the wood-reinforced-with-steel rails. Jepha and Dan are playing some kind of game as they sprawl in the slight shade at the "memorial", a game that involves Dan slapping Jepha in the knees a lot and some nonsense words which Jepha keeps laughing helplessly at; Bert doesn't need to turn now to know the faces they're wearing.

They will wait out here in the desert for him forever if he asks, like they followed him into the dark, like they swam for their lives in the sea of assholes he dragged them into.

"You dick-sucking shit-licker," Quinn says abruptly, making a nearby family in matching orange shirts with matching orange tans and Floridian faces startle and frown (skin cracking like coral), then withdraw frown and themselves as some ancient instinct gets the measure of Quinn and advises that they just get the fuck out fast.

Something huge and black circles overhead, feathers spread into grasping hands.

The Prince and the Pauper didn't work out so well, and Bert's untangling himself from that particular ivory tower like sun-scorched ivy in the face of a flamethrower. It's hot and he's thirsty and the Grand Canyon is a mile-deep kitty-litter tray the colour of shitty boredom. Time to move on.

"I'm hungry," Quinn snaps, and another small child dodges away from the forcefield of his personal odour, his aura of threats and dark holes and Bad Things; or just from the knife wounds barely healed on his forearms, throat, and face.

Which is when the world twists into place like a Chinese puzzle box and everything's obvious again and Bert's standing not on the bottom rung of a precarious railing but at the start of yet another yellow brick road, a map of lines distorting the landscape to fit in the palm of his hand.

He squints against the sun at Quinn's frustrated face.

"My, grandma, what big teeth you have."

Quinn glares. "All the better to give you mom hickeys with, asshole."

And Bert has a plan again. All he needs now is a newspaper's society pages, something to drink, and a little time in the shade, and they can all be fucking richer than Croesus _and_ Madonna put together.

"Fuckass."

"Asshole."

Bert jumps down off the rail and waves an imperious hand around until it connects with Jepha's head. "Hey, Princess. Frogface. We're leaving."

The canyon stretches away behind him, but Bert never looks back.


End file.
